How-To Geek

Google Assistant is going away after a stay of execution last year. Google is emailing customers to let them know that its original voice assistant will be "discontinued" in favor of Gemini on Android and Wear OS starting September 4.

It's safe to say everyone wants a little more privacy and battery life when it comes to our smartphones. But did you know there are two little Samsung settings hiding on your phone that can deliver a bit of both?

I have the great honor and misfortune of being the designated techie in my social circle. Everyone I know funnels their network misery to me, and it didn't take long before I started bringing a few little tools with me to speed things along.

A Raspberry Pi is a great device to start your journey into the world of self-hosting. You can run single services such as Home Assistant or Pi-hole, or run multiple services on the same device. There may come a point when you’ve outgrown your Raspberry Pi, and there are usually some telltale signs.

In 1978, Formula 1 team Brabham showed up to the Swedish Grand Prix with a car that had a giant fan bolted to its tail. The fan pulled air out from underneath the BT46B and sucked the car onto the track, generating downforce without the drag caused by a wing.

Most people know Canonical for Ubuntu, but the company has quietly built an entire ecosystem of open-source tools around it. As someone who runs a small homelab, I went down the rabbit hole of Canonical's project catalog, and found three tools stood out: Multipass, MAAS, and MicroCloud. They solve very different problems at very different scales, so let's start with the one you can actually use today.

Photography can be a real money pit, even though it doesn’t need to be. Gear acquisition syndrome is real, and the pursuit of more lenses, bodies, and accessories haunts amateurs and professionals alike.

For years, freezing panes was one of my first moves whenever I opened a large spreadsheet. It kept headers visible, stopped me from losing my place, and made scrolling through thousands of rows much easier. But over time, I realized I was using one feature to solve several different problems—and modern Excel already has better tools for many of them.

HBO Max's flagship releases for August—I’m looking at you, Lanterns, Mother Mary, and Conan O’Brien Must Go—are still a couple of weeks away, but U.S. subscribers to the prestige streaming service still have options. If you’re into reality TV, this week brings two brand-new series for you, as well as a recently launched comedy that's still rolling.

Android Auto makes it easier (and safer) to use your phone while driving—it also uses a lot of battery in the process. This is especially true for wireless Android Auto, but it can even cause the juice to drop while plugged in, too. One easy automation helps—and it makes a lot of sense.

There are hundreds of Linux distros out there, and most of them are genuinely good—as long as they're used by the people they're designed for. The whole point of a Linux distro is to package the Linux kernel with a particular desktop environment, package manager, and system defaults fine-tuned for a specific type of user or workflow.

August just might be the hottest month on the calendar for HBO Max. House of the Dragon wraps one of its best seasons ever this coming weekend, Lanterns finally lights up mid-month with Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre, Anne Hathaway does something decidedly non-Devil Wears Prada-ish in Mother Mary, and Bob Odenkirk keeps his ass-kicking movie career going with Normal.

I run a NAS at home, and for a long time, I've been dragging and dropping files with almost zero wait time. So when my transfers started crawling for no obvious reason, I was pretty puzzled.

Google's teased notification LED for Pixel 11 phones might not be as transformative as you think. A leaked product image of the Pixel 11 Pro Fold indicates that the new feature, HiLight, will only have two functions.

Luxury badges no longer guarantee the best luxury experience. Over the past decade, mainstream automakers have dramatically improved the quality of their interiors, technology, and comfort, to the point where some family SUVs now rival premium brands while costing thousands less.

One of the easiest ways to make an Excel report unreliable is to forget one tiny step: refreshing the PivotTables behind it. Microsoft recognized the problem and announced Auto Refresh a year ago, but the feature still hasn't reached my version of Excel.

If you've got an old Android tablet, and you don't know what to do with it, there are plenty of apps out there that can make it almost as useful as it was when it was fresh out of the box. All the apps featured below are free (or have free versions that retain most of the features of their paid counterparts), work on older versions of Android (every app supports at least Android 8.0 Oreo), and are very lightweight.

Mini PCs are becoming the go-to solution for desktop computing in 2026. Unless you have a very specific need, a mini PC likely will serve you well. I recently found out that my mini PC could be powered over USB—something my full-size desktop never could dream of. Plus, five other overlooked things that I didn't realize a mini PC could do until recently.

After setting up my Bambu Lab P2S last week, I set about doing what anyone does with a new toy: thoroughly testing it out. After printing the usual poop-chutes and toolboxes, I recalled something I added to my printing list roughly six months ago. I had no idea it would print so well.

Breaking into the top tier of the compact SUV segment has never been easy. Buyers in this class expect practicality, efficiency, modern technology, and strong value, which means even a complete redesign isn't always enough to shake up the established order. Any newcomer hoping to climb the rankings has to prove it can improve on a formula that's already been refined for years.